Where did the 2019 New Coronavirus first spread to humans? The Wall Street Journal has revealed some important details from a U.S. intelligence report that once again targets suspicion at a virus institute in Wuhan, China, the site of the earliest outbreak of the pandemic that has spread around the world.
The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday (May 23) that three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, visited a hospital because they were unwell before the first cases of the new coronavirus infection were discovered in China. The report did not specify exactly what illness the three researchers had, but their illnesses occurred in November 2019, a month before China announced its first case of the new coronavirus.
The State Department released a “factual report” during the last phase of the Trump administration. That report said, “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research became ill in the fall of 2019, and that the first patients with the new coronavirus were identified shortly thereafter, and that their illnesses were consistent with the new coronavirus and ordinary seasonal illnesses.”
However, the U.S. intelligence community’s report, as reported by the Wall Street Journal this time, is more specific, providing not only the number of people who became ill in the lab and the timing of the onset, but also details of their hospital visits.
The Wall Street Journal said these details would provide a new basis for a push to launch a broader investigation into the Wuhan Virus Institute lab leak. The WHO’s decision-making body, the WHO Assembly, is scheduled to meet Monday and believes the new findings could help strengthen calls for a continued independent investigation into whether there was a lab leak.
According to public reports from the early days of the outbreak in China, the first cases of the new coronavirus were identified in Wuhan in December 2019. Initially, it was thought that the Wuhan South China Seafood Market was the source of the virus, but later studies disproved this view. At that time, many epidemiologists and virologists believed that the virus had been present in the Wuhan area long before December. Chinese scholars conducted a number of investigations on the viral host of the virus and made several inferences, but they were later rejected. And it was an indisputable fact at the time that the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research, which had been conducting research on the new coronavirus for many years, was the single most likely target of suspicion for a laboratory leak to occur.
The Chinese media during that period suspected that a master’s intern at the Wuhan Institute of Virus had contracted the virus in an accident and asked the institute to provide the whereabouts of that person. Some reports said the graduate student had died. The head of this institute had come forward to say that this graduate student had left and was in good health. But to date, this person has never been seen in public.
Later, the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party ordered leaders at all levels to tightly control and block information about the virus data and related research results. Thereafter any articles and statements doubting and questioning the source of the virus disappeared completely from the Chinese domestic media.
Thus, the investigation into whether there was a virus leak at the Wuhan Virus Institute ceased completely before it had time to officially begin. At the same time, Beijing launched a massive propaganda war of blame dumping by activating the state apparatus out of fear that the global pandemic might cause the international community to come after China.
Chinese officials and scientists have vehemently denied that the virus leaked from Wuvox and have vigorously promoted the idea that the virus may have occurred simultaneously in many parts of the world before the outbreak in Wuhan, where it was transmitted through frozen food and other means.
China’s foreign ministry has even repeatedly turned the tables on the United States, first saying that U.S. athletes brought the virus to Wuhan during the 2019 Wuhan Military Games and later saying that the virus may have come from a lab at a U.S. military base in Maryland.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a press conference on Monday (May 24) that “three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research fell ill” is completely untrue. He also denied that the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research had been exposed to the new coronavirus before Dec. 30, 2019. Zhao Lijian said that the staff and graduate students at the WRI “maintain zero novel coronavirus infections.
A spokeswoman for the National Security Council said the Biden administration “still has serious questions” about the initial situation of the pandemic, including the source of the virus in China, according to Reuters. She said the U.S. government is working with the WHO and other countries to support experts in assessing the source of the virus without outside interference or politicization.
WHO and China completed a joint investigation into the source of the virus in March, which concluded that a laboratory leak was “highly unlikely.
However, WHO experts complained that the Chinese side did not provide the WHO panel with early and original information about the virus. The United States and other Western countries have demanded that China fully open up its raw data to independent experts.
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